


First-Foot

by A_Firewatchers_Daughter



Category: The Hour (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, First Foot, Hogmanay, New Year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28464135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Firewatchers_Daughter/pseuds/A_Firewatchers_Daughter
Summary: First-foot (n.): the first person to cross a householder's threshold in the New Year, in accordance with Scottish custom.
Relationships: Randall Brown/Lix Storm
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	First-Foot

** December 31st, 1958 **

It was strange.

There were only a few minutes left of the year, and Lix Storm was, predictably, still in her office with a bottle of whisky.

So much had almost been lost. Lix’s stomach turned with the memory of the fear she had felt when she had seen Freddie Lyon’s battered body lying outside. She had thought he would die. They all did. Bel was distraught. Hector was in pieces. And Randall, he had been a liar throughout the entire ordeal. Not once did he admit he was scared. It had caused Lix to fantasise about slapping some reality into him a few times.

But Freddie was alive. Permanently changed, with a limp and some minor cognitive issues, but alive and coping and even thriving with absolute defiance against the idea that some odious thug would take his life and his work from him. He was lucky to have survived that and he knew it every single day.

Lix had once been the same way.

What _had_ been lost, though, was that sleeping hope on which she had got by these past two decades.

She was entering the coming year with a new wound. One she had sustained months ago but had never got around to actually examining. Maybe that was cowardice more than anything else. She knew it would hurt and so avoided it at all costs.

Every so often, she wondered what would have happened had she kept Sofia. Would they have got on? Lix was capable of being difficult and she knew it all too well. Would Randall have come back? She liked to tell herself he would, but she could not be sure. By the way he had talked while looking for Sofia, he probably wouldn’t have been able to keep away if he’d known where she was. Perhaps they would have fallen together into a family. They might have married – Randall had a traditional streak through him. They could have had more children. It was the one scenario in which Lix might have considered setting down some roots. But war dictated every facet of their lives, and so she had made her decision. One that had cost her in lost possibilities.

And, of course, she had paid for it with her daughter’s life.

Europe, as a journalist and single mother, was no place for her to bring up a child. She would have had to work to get by and journalism was the only work she ever really knew how to do well. Sofia would have been dragged around for far too long before Lix was called back to London.

But if Sofia had survived two years on the continent with her frankly reckless mother and had eventually been brought to London, she may well have been killed in exactly the same way in 1941 or 1944.

Or maybe she would have been evacuated. Lots of children had been evacuated.

Still, many returned before 1944.

Lix startled slightly as Big Ben struck midnight and the horns from the Thames blasted in celebration. She supposed she should join them really – at least this hideous year was now behind her.

“Happy New Year,” she muttered to herself, taking a drink. “Good riddance.”

Even as she said that, she remembered the preceding year had brought her one thing for which she was grateful: Randall Brown. As infuriating as he was, and though their intertwined histories were painful, she was glad to have him around again. At least she had someone who could begin to understand the size of the hole in her heart.

Like he had been called by her thinking his name, in through the door he walked. “Happy New Year,” he said quietly.

“Happy New Year.” She frowned. “What are you still doing here?”

“I might ask the same of you.”

“This is standard behaviour for me. You, however, have a routine, and it doesn’t generally involve being in my office at midnight.”

“I made an exception.”

He lifted his hand slightly, in which he carried a bag; he took from it a bottle of whisky, shortbread and an unknown object very neatly wrapped in a towel. He handed her the package, which she unwrapped. “Coal?”

“Yes. The first-foot should always bring coal with him. Technically, I should be at your house with this but since you spend more time here than you spend at home, this should suffice.”

Lix smiled. “And here I was thinking you didn’t believe in superstition.”

Randall broke open the tin of shortbread. “First-footing isn’t so much superstition as it is tradition, I suppose. And anyway, with the year we’ve just had, I’m taking no chances about luck this year.”

There it was. It was bound to come up. “Do you really think what you bring to my office has any bearing at on our forthcoming fortune?”

“As I said, I’m taking no chances.”

Lix frowned. From what she did know of first-footing, she knew that it concerned the future luck of the visited person, not the visitor. Which meant this had nothing to do with his own fair fortune and everything to do with hers.

All this year, his attempts had been about what was right for her – even if it wasn’t the easy thing to do.

He gave her a piece of shortbread, and she poured herself some whisky. “Luck has more to do with our lives than we care to admit,” she sighed. “Plenty of people survived the bombings by sheer luck.”

“And plenty of others died by the other side of that same luck.”

“I’d much rather luck had nothing to do with it.”

“Of course you do. It would mean you have control.”

“I have control.”

Randall’s eyes flickered ever so slightly to the glass in her hand, and she knew he disagreed about the level of control she had. “You think I drink too much.”

“I _know_ you drink too much.”

“I’m too old to change.”

She had said that before. In the pub after they returned from the French embassy, she had told him she was too old to change. She remained convinced by that and, frankly, she didn’t know what she would do if she couldn’t drink. It was the last defence between her and the world.

Randall got to his feet and began to shift the haphazard books on the windowsill into a more ordered pile. “I wish you would stop drinking,” he said, “but I accept that you probably can’t. Maybe ten years ago, you could have, but now? You’re too used to it. It’s habitual, like me reordering things.”

Lix stood up. “We haven’t talked about your year,” she said. “You came all the way here to try and find Sofia and look what happened.”

“It’s better to know the truth than to never know a thing.”

“Is it?”

He allowed her a small and sad smile. “It is for me.”

“And Freddie?”

Randall’s hands froze. “I can’t help but feel some responsibility for what happened to him. I told him to keep looking.”

“He would have done that with or without your encouragement.” She reached out and took his hand. “You can’t claim responsibility for every calamity, Randall.”

He looked down at their linked hands. “A resolution,” he said. “I am responsible only for the decisions I make.”

“And I am as much at the hands of chance as anyone else,” she replied, “and that’s something I will simply need to accept.”

She looked back around at the desk, at the gifts he had waited until after midnight to bring, and smiled. “I think you know whose luck you were trying to ensure,” Lix said, “and it wasn’t your own.” She rested her palm on his cheek. “My first-foot.”

“Where else would I go?”

“Home, like a sensible person, instead of wasting your time trying to bring me, of all people, luck.”

Randall sighed. “Of all people, nobody deserves some good fortune more than you,” he replied.

For the entire year, they had dodged this moment. They told themselves it was the wrong time, or they were the wrong people, or there was nothing left between them. She found herself frightened. Afraid that she was no longer who he had loved. Perhaps luck brought courage, or else courage came with the knowledge chance had little influence over what happened next. These were decisions, not happenings.

Lix kissed Randall. She did it so carefully that she momentarily worried he would mistake her caution for hesitance; after all, caution had not always been something of which she had been the greatest advocate. It was a relief to feel his lip move against hers, responding rather than freeze or worse, drawing back.

His hands fell where they always had: one on her neck, the other on her hip. Her mind went to places she had tried so long to forget: stuffy Spanish bedrooms and tiny offices with gunfire in the distance. Places they had needed one another’s distraction, but their love most of all. Nothing made Lix feel safer in a warzone than knowing, even if it was rarely said, she was loved.

Randall broke away, his eyes searching her face. “You are so beautiful.” He wasn’t searching her. He was admiring her.

“I’m _old_ , Randall,” Lix said, half-laughing.

“You’re beautiful.” She leaned forwards and let her face rest against his. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?” Randall sang gently into her ear. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne?”

“For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne; we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne,” she sang with him. Lix felt Randall kiss her behind her ear, and he took her into his arms.

And in a moment of levity, she almost laughed: her old acquaintance whom she had tried very hard to forget was her first-foot tonight.


End file.
